The cataract is a collective term for diseases of the eye that involve an opacification of the originally clear eye lens. Currently, there are approximately 25 million people worldwide who have become blind due to a cataract, and at least 110 million people who suffer from a substantially impaired vision. An effective medical treatment for reversing cataract formation is currently not available. Therefore, the usual treatment of a cataract is to surgically remove the cloudy lens and to implant an artificial synthetic ocular lens (IOL). This intervention is one of the most common ophthalmologic surgeries.
A very common problem—apart from the development of a so-called aftercaract or a secondary cataract, respectively—is that prior to the intervention, it is virtually impossible to select the lens to be implanted in a way as to avoid further, post-invasive vision corrections. Moreover, irregular wound healing and positioning errors of the artificial intraocular lens often cause visual defects such as myopia, hyperopia or astigmatism. Thus, it is in most cases impossible to exactly predict post-operative refraction following a cataract surgery. Amongst other things, this is due to the fact that the eye is a complex optical system, and some parameters required for such an assessment cannot be measured at all or only to a limited extent, such as the post-operative depth of the anterior chamber which is virtually impossible to determine prior to the intervention. Likewise, the determination of biometrical data of the eye to be operated, such as the radius of the cornea and the axis length, often gives rise to relatively large errors. Consequently, in approximately 83% of the patients, a value is currently obtained that deviates from the desired value by a maximum of plus/minus 1 dpt; in the remaining patients, this deviation is even greater. This deviation must then be corrected by additional corrective lenses such as glasses or a contact lens.